Narratives may provide a general context, unrestricted by space and time, which can be used to organize episodic memories into networks of related events. However, it is not clear how narrative contexts are represented in the brain. Here we test the novel hypothesis that the formation of narrative-based contextual representations in humans relies on the same hippocampal mechanisms that enable formation of spatiotemporal contexts in rodents. Participants watched a movie consisting of two interleaved narratives while we monitored their brain activity using fMRI. We used representational similarity analysis, a type of multivariate pattern analysis, which uses across-voxel correlations as a proxy for neural-pattern similarity, to examine whether the patterns of neural activity can be used to differentiate between narratives and recurring narrative elements, such as people and locations. We demonstrate that the neural activity patterns in the hippocampus differentiate between event nodes (people and locations) and narratives (different stories) and that these narrativecontext representations diverge gradually over time akin to remapping-induced spatial maps represented by rodent place cells.

The ability to form associations between a multitude of events is the hallmark of episodic memory. Computational models have espoused the importance of the hippocampus as convergence zone, binding different aspects of an episode into a coherent representation, by integrating information from multiple brain regions. However, evidence for this long-held hypothesis is limited, since previous work has largely focused on representational and network properties of the hippocampus in isolation. Here we identify the hippocampus as mnemonic convergence zone, using a combination of multivariate pattern and graph-theoretical network analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging data from humans performing an associative memory task. We observe overlap of conjunctive coding and hub-like network attributes in the hippocampus. These results provide evidence for mnemonic convergence in the hippocampus, underlying the integration of distributed information into episodic memory representations.